Euan Mearns discussed the pros and cons of the scheme back in 2018 here
There was a short news item this morning that the decision to go forward has been postponed until the Government further clarify their energy policy.
Does this mean: It's not viable without a massive subsidy? It's not viable if more nuclear is built? They want a guaranteed (high) price for the electricity it produces? Something else?
SSE say they don't need a "subsidy" but do need assurances on "revenue stabilisation" :)
To be fair, it's a /regulated/ energy market so what the regulator will do does matter a lot for investments.
Depending on which report you read, I think the clue may be it's not viable unless the electricity it sells is at a premium price and the electricity it buys is at near zero cost. In this context I wonder if the word subsidy is different to the word grant as they have only provisionally committed to 6.5% of the estimated cost of building?
It's very much like the hype a couple of years back about a solar farm with a large amount of battery backup. The economics of that installation wasn't that solar would supply the grid when the sun was shining but to first charge the batteries and provide a near instantaneous feed in when when there was a shortfall.
FWIW my source was SSE's own report
You have missed out: It's not viable UNLESS more nuclear is built? It's not viable UNLESS more wind/solar/tidal is built?
It stores electricity, so a good supply of off-peak very cheap electricity is exactly what it needs.
No one is going to invest in anything unless there is some certainty over being repaid, with profit.
Long term and risky projects can only be funded by the government.
No
No
The rapists are all in the renewable energy game. Anything that diverts money to something sensible is attacked by powerful lobbies
This is a reasonable scheme - haven't got costings for it so dunno how reasonable. Pumped storage goes well with nuclear, as then you only need short term peak load following. Its pretty useless with wind/solar, but then, what isn't?
Batteries have never been viable for intermittency. They are not big enough. Their use is to replace at huge expense the spinning mass of conventional generation.
Yup, also a waste of resources better used elsewhere. Hydrogen-bromine flow batteries seem to be viable and scaleable no - bit big and heavy but should be durable and only in-out is electricity.
According to Brian Cox, when a Saturn V moonrocket lifted off, the five F1 engines generated enough power to run the whole of the UK electrical demand.
That tallies with the NASA info, which says "85 Hoover Dams".
But for how long?
But how many elephant•wales per cubic fortnight is that?
Back in school days we had physics text book (published by Mills & Boon no less!) that had a section on a real production process. I can't remember the details (presumably about a certain torque being applied to give a certain rate of production), but it had the wonderful unit of a foot-pound-per-pennyweight-fortnight.
I still have a book published by them: "Microcircuit Learming Computes". Early 1970s.
It was suggested, in our university fluid mechanics leactures that viscosity could be measured in acres-per-year
the whole point of such schemes is to buy electricity at near zero & resell it at peak times at peak prices. As far as it helping the grid deal with peaks, it will a little but it's too small to make any great difference. We just don't have the necessary land available to do it on the scale that some countries have.
Likewise for biofuel.
The Saturn V output is 160,000,000 horsepower or 120,000,000 kilowatts. Or 120GW or 120 nuclear reactors of 1GW output each.
The Saturn V probably does not run for an entire hour, so we can't work out the total output in kilowatt*hours.
Using the Hoover dam as a metric, is a bit silly, because the output has varied a bit over its history. Lake Meade is low on water now, and apparently, they've even changed out a few of the generators and changed the generator type. At one time, Hoover may have had a nameplate rating of 2GW.
Paul
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